Measures for a Better Youth Development Environment in European Professional Football

Both UEFA and the EU institutions favour the local training of young sports players, to guarantee a healthy development of European sports and their players. Recent empirical research supports the idea that professional football players need initial experience in a domestic first team to realise successful careers, a requirement that is threatened by increasing international youth player mobility. Existing measures are scarce, mainly focus on a legal perspective and do not realise the envisaged objectives. This study has the objective to develop new measures to more easily retain young talents in their European domestic league, without limiting the free movement of professional players. This paper's main contribution is the proposition of flexible, quantitative measures, based on microeconomic models, to (1) create a level playing field for player wages to increase the domestic league's attractiveness for domestic players, (2) curtail player loans and (3) better reward clubs' youth training efforts, while at the same time discouraging adverse international youth transfers. The impact on the overall competitive balance between leagues is assessed as well. Lay Summary Existing measures to realise UEFA's and the EU's objective of limiting international youth transfers have been demonstrated to be insufficient. In this paper, economic measures are developed, in order to retain youth players sufficiently long, while safeguarding professional player mobility and the international competitive balance, to guarantee the further development of talents and the sport.